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How to score in jobs game

| April 10, 2013 9:00 PM

The room was packed with a record crowd for yesterday's Jobs Plus annual luncheon and local employment report. Focus was centered more on what the organization has accomplished since it was created in 1987 than what's happened on the local jobs front in the past year. And that seemed fine with everybody; maybe everyone in the room understood that the hardest game around is jobs growth.

Let's see if more people outside that room get it, too.

As an AP report outlined in Sunday's Press, unemployment remains uncomfortably high at 7.6 percent. True, that's the lowest unemployment rate in four years, but it's three times as high as the pre-recession level and, as Sunday's story illustrates, just packed with peril.

In March alone, nearly half a million unemployed people quit looking for work. Some of them might not be models of American work ethic, but as the country slowly emerges from the aftershocks of recession, literally millions of previously employed citizens have simply given up on one of the most challenging jobs of their lives: Trying to get a job. That's why the announced unemployment rate comes up consistently short in reflecting the real work-a-day world.

What it does do, though, is keep people like Steve Griffitts employed. And highly valued.

The head of our region's economic development agency, Griffitts continues to compete not just for great companies to move here, but to keep our current employers from going elsewhere. And the best way to do that is to help them grow stronger roots here, which leads to stronger profits and, presto!, more jobs.

Griffitts has no control over confidence-eating disasters like the $16 trillion federal deficit, which is the nastiest linebacker on a daunting defense against which an undersized offense is trying to score in the job growth game. What he does have, though, is great teamwork throughout Idaho, from local officials like Kootenai County's city councils and county commissioners all the way to the offices of Gov. Butch Otter and Commerce Department Director Jeff Sayer.

While it's true that our region has struggled to bring in loads of great jobs in the past year or to keep everybody already here happy, that's far better than many of Griffitts' competitors have done. We have a beautiful region to sell and a very willing workforce. We can make greater gains in the jobs game by ensuring that locally and statewide, every effort is made to be business-friendly without sacrificing the quality of life strengths already in our portfolio. Supporting Griffitts and Jobs Plus is job one for ultimately winning this championship game.